Relief at slight fall in repossessions
Thursday, 9 February 2012 11:51 AM
Repossessions fell two per cent last year to the lowest annual total since the peak of the housing market and the start of the credit crunch in 2007, according to the Council of Mortgage Lenders (CML).
Banks repossessed a total of 36,200 homes in 2011 compared to 37,100 in 2010 and 48,300 in 2009. In the final three months of the year they took back 8,500 homes compared with 8,100 in the same period of 2010.
Buy-to-let landlords accounted for 5,900 of the repossessions over the year, an increase of 25 per cent on 2010. That meant 0.42 per cent of homes in the sector were taken back by lenders, up from 0.36 per cent.
In contrast repossessions of owner-occupiers fell six per cent to 30,300 and the repossession rate fell from 0.32 per cent to 0.31 per cent.
Mortgage arrears also saw an improvement over the year. A total of 159,400 mortgages had arrears of more than 2.5 per cent of the mortgage balance in 2011, which was down 7.5 per cent on 2010.
However, the CML is predicting that things will get worse in 2012, with 45,000 repossessions and 180,000 mortgages more than 2.5 per cent in arrears.
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